A characterization of limiting distributions of estimators in an autoregressive process

Summary Let the random variablesX ₁,X ₂, ...,X _n be generated by the first-order autoregressive modelX _i =θX _i−1 +e _i wheree _i ,i=1, 2, ...,n, are i.i.d. random variables with mean zero, variance σ², and with unspecified density functiong(·). In the present paper we obtain a characterization of limiting distributions of nonparametric and parametric estimators of θ as well as a local asymptotic minimax bound of the risks of estimators.